FengGui - heatmapping where visitors would click on your site
Why is this a good idea
When designing a site you need to take various things into consideration when doing the user interface because you need a clear and intuitive combination. You need the right mix of colours and positioning for things to work, correctly implementing contrast and whatnot is a must. But how do you validate your design? Few of us will create several alternatives and give prospective users the vote, but we will sometimes ask for the opinion of others (friends, collegues).
That's where Feng-Gui.com come in - they have a free service that allows you to specify a URL (to a website or image) and their algorithm will attempt to emulate how a user would view the site.
What it aims to achieve
What it should be able to do is outline areas of strong contrast and weight them against their position to create a probability of users clicking the area. This area is then coloured to represent how "hot" it would be in terms of user activity. So essentially this is the theoretical side to Google Analytics' "Site Overlay" (which actually shows you the links people click),
Although, it's not quite right
It's a very complicated algorithm (I guess anyway) and I respect the creators a lot for making it, but it doesn't seem to work perfectly. Sure it gives a good idea of where users will click but as you'll be able to see below in the Seopher.com example - it misses obvious regions rather well.
I tested it on the homepage of this site which utilises a fairly basic layout. The algorithm correctly identifies the left hand side navigation as a main source of clicking action but it also believes the introduction paragraph to be the same. True enough they use the same colours and contrast so this is largely forgiveable (but it does demonstrate the limitations of the system).
It entirely avoids the RSS links and logo on the upper-right of the page (and the sponsored links) and instead opts for the header region of the right hand side (the "Recent articles" bit in the green). Again, this is because it uses the same colours and contrast but I'm willing to believe there are more sites out there that have more than one link style (i.e. navigation vs. in-page-links).
It's a great idea, implemented as well as possible
It's a lovely site, a smashing interface and a great idea. I'm willing to admit that while it's not perfect; it's probably as good as you can get with artificial visitor AI because an awful lot is left to interpretation of words and free will and an algorithm that looks primarily at colours, positions and contrasts is always going to get things wrong. However, it's a quality service that's been around for a while and it still looks like a lot of people are using it. Good stuff. Visit Feng-Gui.com.
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Showing most recent 2 of 2 comments
We will strive to improve the ViewFinder heatmap service to adjust it to human visual search in web pages .
Rafael Mizrahi
Feng-GUI Team
Once someone pays attention to some part of the page, they can usually figure out what they want to click on, but if part of the page simply never catches anyone’s attention they doesn’t matter what is clickable. Also, there’s more to a page than simply clicking on stuff... you might want people to read the text now and then.